COACH KING'S MARTIAL ARTS JOURNEY
The life behind my approach to modern martial arts
I was about four when I first watched martial arts films on a reel at my uncle’s home in Johannesburg. I loved the fighting, of course, but what stayed with me was the possibility that someone who had been frightened and pushed around could learn to meet the world differently. For a child growing up as I was, that possibility mattered.
I grew up on the South Side of Johannesburg, where violence was part of ordinary life. There was bullying outside the home and abuse within it. My mother was an alcoholic, and I never knew my father. I was a gentle, imaginative child who loved books and drawing, trying to find my way in circumstances that gave me very little say in what happened to me. When I began karate at six, I wanted to be able to protect myself. Looking back, I can see how important it was to hold on to that gentle, imaginative part of myself too.
At seventeen, I was homeless on Johannesburg’s inner-city streets. Military service followed, and later work on the doors of nightclubs where violence had consequences a training room could never fully reproduce. Those years made effectiveness matter to me. I needed to understand what I could actually use under pressure, how quickly a situation could change, and how much depended on recognising trouble before it became a fight.
Eventually, teaching offered me a way to build a different life. I started an academy, developed Crazy Monkey, and found myself coaching people in places the boy I had been could scarcely have imagined visiting. Martial arts became my profession. Over more than three decades, I have taught everyone from people wanting a little more confidence in their everyday lives to combat athletes, law-enforcement officers and special-forces operators. The responsibilities differed, but each person brought more into training than a body that needed to learn a technique.
Martial arts gave me a livelihood, extraordinary friendships, and opportunities I could offer my children that I had never had myself. I remain grateful for that. Much of what I know about patience, persistence and working with other people was learned through practice and teaching. But I also became caught up in parts of the culture I now question. Toughness could stand in for honesty. Working harder could postpone an uncomfortable question. Being capable on the mat could become a way of reassuring myself that the rest of my life must be in order too.
Then my health collapsed. Years of demanding training and repeated impacts were part of the history I had to confront. There was severe degeneration in my cervical spine, and a neurologist described symptoms I was experiencing as CTE-like. Alongside that, I began living with ME/CFS, with exhaustion that changed what I could do from day to day. It remains part of my life. I could no longer train as I once had, and determination could not make my body return to the routine around which I had organised so much of my identity.
That was a profound loss. Martial arts had been the centre of my life since childhood, and coaching was how I made my living and understood much of who I was. Having to change my relationship with training left me asking what remained when some of the abilities I had relied on were no longer available in the same way. I had spent years learning how to protect myself. I now had to examine whether my understanding of protection included the person doing all that training.
Here on the Isle of Man, walking became part of that examination. Moving more slowly, spending time outside and allowing myself to stop gave me another way to engage with my body and my life. I still live with limitations, and I am still learning how to work with them. There are days when adapting is the work. I have come to take that seriously as part of self-preservation, including the difficult admission that rest, support and a change of direction can be necessary.
My work in applied philosophy, ecopsychology and mindfulness-in-action has accompanied that rethinking. A question now runs through everything I do: how can we flourish and remain deeply human within the pressures of modern life? For me, martial arts has a place in answering it. I care about what a person can do under pressure, and about the life that capability helps them sustain.
That is what I mean by holistic self-preservation. Physical skills belong within a larger responsibility to care for our health, exercise judgement and protect the people and relationships that matter to us. Awareness, de-escalation, clear boundaries and the decision to leave all belong within it, as does recognising when we need help. It also asks something of the training itself: the methods used to develop capability should respect the person whose capability we are developing.
The martial part of my work remains practical. Through Crazy Monkey boxing and jiu-jitsu, I want people to develop usable skills and an honest understanding of their limits. That requires resistance, appropriate pressure and time spent practising with others. It also requires a coach to make thoughtful decisions about intensity. The amount of punishment a person can endure tells me very little about whether the session was worthwhile. I am interested in what they learned, what they can use, and whether they can continue practising sustainably.
Inner defence is part of that same work. Calmness, presence, focus and resilience have meaning when we bring them into an actual training situation. We can learn to notice when frustration is making us careless, recover our attention when an exchange overwhelms us, and recognise when our wish to prove something has begun directing our choices. A coach can help make those moments visible and give a student room to work with them.
Those qualities do not automatically follow us out of the gym. Being composed during sparring does not settle how we respond to a difficult conversation or a setback at work. We have to make that connection through attention and practice, becoming curious about where the same habits appear in daily life and whether we can respond differently.
This is the meaning of Mat | Street | Life for me. On the mat, we practise with people who trust us with their bodies and their learning. In situations where physical safety is at stake, we need capability and judgement directed towards getting ourselves and others through. In everyday life, the practice can help us examine how we meet uncertainty, use our attention and carry our strength. The life we have outside training is part of what the training is for.
The School of Crazy Monkey is where I want to put that philosophy into practice with others. Most people have families, jobs, health concerns and responsibilities that deserve to be taken seriously. I want them to have a place where they can challenge themselves, ask questions, adapt the training and learn without having to earn their belonging through toughness. For those who teach this approach, that responsibility extends to the atmosphere they create and what their students come to believe strength is for.
I still love martial arts, and there is much I still want to learn. My health has changed how I participate, while the practice continues to matter deeply to me. What I am trying to achieve now, alongside those I teach, is a form of training that helps us become more capable of protecting life and more thoughtful about how we inhabit it. I have to keep asking that of my own practice too.